The present invention relates to a method of translating data from a knowledge base to data for a data base in a data storage and utilization system.
As a system for utilizing an enormous amount of data with high efficiency through data storage and management, there is known a data base system (reference may be made, for example, to C. J. Date's "An Introduction to Database Systems" published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1981). The data base management system capable of storing and managing a large amount of data of particular categories and having systematic structures can afford an extensive retrieval function or capability by making use of the set operation, arithmetic operation and the like (reference may be made to the above cited literature, Section 4, pages 83 to 93 as well as Section 7, pages 117 to 123 and in particular pages 132 to 133).
On the other hand, the knowledge base can store miscellaneous knowledge data of different structures, and the knowledge base management system for managing the knowledge base is imparted with a function to perform inferential retrieval of the knowledge data on the basis of semantic relation, as is disclosed in Japanese Pat. Application Laid-Open No. 140443/1985 (JP-A-60-140443).
In the present state of the art, the data stored in the knowledge base diversify over a great number of different categories while the amount of data belonging to a single category remains relatively small. It is however expected that as the knowledge is accumulated more and more, the amount of knowledge data will attain a considerably great value. For dealing with such a large amount of knowledge data, there will undoubtedly arise a demand for an extensive retrieval function comparable to that of the data base management system. In this connection, it is however noted that the data stored in the knowledge base have no systematic architecture and thus ill-fitted for application of the retrieval function of the type carried out by the data base management system.